James Pethokoukis

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Washington will have difficulty producing a stranger bit of public policy than raising investment taxes to pay for healthcare reform. Remember, the consensus critique of the U.S economy is that it’s been plagued by too much consumption and debt. O.K., fine. So the answer is penalizing savings and investment? Really? Pure Bizarro economics for that and a number of other reasons:

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David Leonhardt of the NYT just noticed that tax rates are going up and wealth is being redistributed. This makes him happy. But right now American faces a wealth creation problem. And if that isn’t working, every other problem facing America looks a lot worse. He also assumes that wealthier Americans won’t change their behavior, reducing the government’s take. Again, here is WH CEA Chair Christina Romer’s take on higher taxes when she was a econ prof at Berkeley: “Tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained, and highly significant negative impact on output … [and] that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects.”

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Iraq is now considered a safer bet than Argentina, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Dubai — and is nearly on par with the State of California, according to Bloomberg statistics on credit default swaps, which are considered a raw indicator of default risk.